Spanish Cuisines

Can Jose Garces translate his celeb-seeking mojo to NYC’s tourist-thronged Times Square, while still maintaining the polished integrity demonstrated at Battery City’s outpost of Amada? That’s the hope at the just-opened Ortzi, located in the Luma Hotel…

Hot dogs are probably the last thing you’d expect to find on the menu at Huertas; a Basque-inspired cider bar and tapas hotspot, which took the East Village by storm with its convivial, family-style feasts and elegant, passed pintxos last year. But in a playful stroke of seasonal genius, the team decided to institute a summer-long, weekends-only hot dog takeout window, which kicked off mid June and will continue to run until Labor Day…

Tapas have been trending in a major way for some time now, making “shareable small bites” a fixture on menus all over New York, no matter the cuisine. But Huertas, a new Basque restaurant in the East Village, goes straight to the source of the craze, focusing on the diminutive Spanish snacks known as pintxos…

Anyone who’s eaten with me knows I don’t care much about the scene. It’s not that I’m a hater. I just prefer great food to a great room or cool crowd. Afterall, you can’t eat decor (as they say). So I was a little wary when I walked into Toro opening week to find the 100-seat tapas spot, packed with scenesters, clamoring for a peek of the new eatery and a taste of the food (or at least I was). Housed in the former Nabisco factory, Toro boasts sky high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson River. The industrial chic space is outfitted with hanging aged jamon, a bull’s head, plenty of high top communal tables to socialize while you’re nibbling on tapas, and an ivy-covered wall at the rear of the restaurant near the plancha bar, which happen to be the best seats in the house…

Boston has a lot more to offer New York than just Baked Beans, Clam Chowder and Cream Pies. In fact, our city has just become home to one of the South End’s best restaurants, Toro, a Barcelona-inspired tapas joint owned by chefs Ken Oringer and Jamie Bissonnette. Housed in the old Nabisco Factory building in the Meatpacking District, overlooking the Hudson River, the 100-seat eatery is outfitted with floor-to-ceiling windows, an arched entryway flanked by an ivy-colored wall, and a pair of lofty, wooden shelves sporting hanging Iberico Hams. And like its Boston predecessor, Toro serves a mix of traditional and modern Spanish dishes, made with greenmarket-inspired ingredients…

New Yorkers embrace food from all over the world. We can’t get enough Korean, Thai, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese… you get the picture. But (and that’s a big but) we don’t typically take kindly to foreigners, at least not in the food department. Think about how many foreign restaurants have planted flags on our soil only to be sent back to their country defeated. Let’s be honest, many of them had it coming. But from the sea of full tables in the dining room on a recent Saturday night, that’s not the case for Manzanilla, a brand new Spanish spot in Gramercy.

The back room is the place for a full, leisurely meal at La Fonda del Sol. CUISINE: Modern Spanish VIBE: Buzzing midtown hub OCCASION: Business lunch; after-work tapas; group dinner DON’T-MISS DISH: Grilled calamari, pumpkin seed-crusted lamb, suckling pig, Mexican chocolate cake AVERAGE PRICE: Appetizers, $9; entrees, $28; desserts, $9 RESERVATIONS: Accepted Josh DeChellis has bounced around a bunch over the past few years. He’s what I call a restaurant drifter, a chef with no home. It all started with the closing of Rocco DiSpirito’s Union Pacific. And you can taste it in his cooking. The back room is for grownups who want to talk business in a suit and exercise their table manners. And each room gets an appropriate menu. If you want affordable tapas, go to the front room. If you want a traditional suite of...

946 Second Ave., near 50th St. (212) 355-6565 Dinner: Sun.-Wed., 5:30-10 p.m., Thu.-Sat., 5:30-midnight. CUISINE Creative ceviche VIBE Lively neighborhood haunt OCCASION Solo flight, casual date DON’T-MISS DISH Spicy yellowfin tuna; Kona kampachi PRICES $8-$25 RESERVATIONS No reservations accepted There are those few precious restaurants you contemplate keeping to yourself. It is a selfish act, though not an unreasonable one, as a way to safeguard tiny haunts harboring gutsy chefs and even gutsier flavors. Crave Ceviche Bar is one of those rare finds in a part of town better known for its happy hours and expense-account dinners. Candlelight dances about the beachy nook, marked with white paneling, wood floors and exposed brick walls. Scribbled on a blackboard are not daily specials, but the names of hopeful diners anxious for one of 21 seats. This is the first obstacle. The...

The latest in a series of tapas joints to grace Manhattan kicked-off Tuesday evening after a number of setbacks and massive speculation (myself included). Of course I had to see this with my own eyes. Opening night and Noho’s newest resident was abuzz, brimming with tapas loyalists, gourmet groupies and trendy types. Every chair was taken in the narrow 90-seat space, industrially-outfitted with unfinished wood tables, brick walls and an eating counter with a view into a white subway-tiled open kitchen: think Casa Mono meets Boqueria on a dimmer. But Mercat’s most inviting accessory was a centerstage ham-and-cheese station, which will no doubt allure potential loiterers (myself included). Owner & native Barcelonian, Jaime Reixach, has enlisted chefs David Seigal (Bouley) & Ryan Lowder (Jean Georges) to employ his Catalan-inspired vision of small plates, which take the form of snails...